The Lacuna (40 page)

“This was when, ’42?”

“The end of summer, right after the Japanese deployed their floatplane bomber from that sub they sent up the Columbia River. It looked like a good time for the country to get our goods under cover.”

“You’re putting me on. If it weren’t for Tojo attacking Fort Stevens…”

“That’s right. I might be up at Highlands Hospital with Zelda
Fitzgerald. Instead, I’m living down the street from there in a house I bought with Uncle Sam’s paycheck.”

“Shazam,” said Artie. “All’s fair in love and war.”

“Believe me, I know this. Better than most.”

“Well, for better or worse, all this they already know about you. What else? What employment history do they have in your file at the State Department?”

“I’m not sure. I think my name must have come to them through a gallery in New York where I delivered paintings from Mexico. Or the school where I taught Spanish.”

“Okay, mention those. And anything you recall listing in your employment records at those establishments. Church membership, this kind of thing, to pad out the résumé. Though you are not a joiner, you’ve said. So give them primary schools in Mexico, the one in D.C. The name of the painter who sent you to New York.”

“Will they really go and talk to instructors at the Potomac Academy?”

“So what, they’ll find out you were a schoolboy. I don’t want to worry you excessively, but schoolboy shenanigans are not now your biggest concern.”

September 3

Today Bull’s Eye departed, and all this he took with him: schoolboy shenanigans, promises broken, dormitories and secret assignations. An invisible boy made manifest, seen for once by another’s eyes, if only for a short while. A city of memories has gone up in fire and gas, and there can be no remorse.

Mrs. Brown wouldn’t tolerate having the notebook burned in the fireplace. But in the end she did the job herself, outside in the barrel where she burns scrap papers. “Potomac Academy 1933” has left the world.

She was opposed at first. “You need your notebooks,” she kept in
sisting. Without the notes she fears I’ll make a mess of things, like Tristram Shandy. She still refuses to believe the memoir will not be written. I met her gaze, and leveled.

“Look, Mrs. Brown. You’re a practical person. And you know me. So don’t ask for impossible things. I’m working on a different book now.”

“So you said.”

“It was a mistaken idea, the memoir. Dragging my own entrails out for the public. And not my idea to start with, you’ll recall. I told you I’d given it up when the little leather-bound diary turned up missing. Really I should get rid of all of them, just so you’ll quit nagging me about it. But I’m starting with this one.”

She had come a half hour early, today of all days, and caught me red-handed. The broad, canvas-bound notebook in my hand. I’d been wondering how to set that cotton duck to flame; the army tends to manufacture indestructible things. Stamped plainly across the front: “Potomac Academy.” She could probably see right through to the naked figures inside, as if catching me with an eight-pager. I may have blushed.

“If you won’t let me burn it now, I’ll just do it after you leave this evening.”

“Do as you please then. This evening.” Without another word she went to the dining room, slapped out the work on her table, and said little the whole day. But at five o’clock, crept upstairs to my study door. “Mr. Shepherd, be ye free for a word?”

“All right.”

“It’s something to grieve you, is it? In that notebook you now want burned.”

She has borne so much from her inconstant leader. The panics of the last month, for example. A better August than some, but still she takes the brunt.

“It’s nothing special, Mrs. Brown. I’m just ready to be done with school days.”

“Anybody would be queasy, with federal men nosing in your business.”

She acknowledged the deed would already be done, if she had not by chance caught the earlier bus this morning. “Mr. Shepherd, I’ve got no business depriving you of your own intents and purposes. Give it over and we’ll be done.”

She took it out to the backyard. I watched from the upstairs window, wondering if she would have a glance inside; it’s possible I was testing her. But she did not look. It was her choice to burn it in the barrel with the day’s used envelopes and botched letters, rather than in the living room. “Here now, it’s still the dog days,” she said. “What might the neighbors think, seeing smoke from your hearth on such a warm day of September?”

She is out there now. The week’s rubbish went into the tar barrel, the canvas-bound book flaring vividly in the center, its blackened leaves impossibly thin and intact, curling open before disintegrating. She stepped back from the heat of the barrel, but will remain at her post until everything is vapor. Viewed from above, she is framed by fences on both sides of the strange tableau: Mrs. Brown destroys the evidence. Her hat, a small blue plate, dampening in dark speckles as a light summer rain begins to fall.

Now the job is done.

September 8

Today the appeasement program begins. After a weekend spent drawing together a mess of notes into genuine prose, I have produced evidence of a new book. Not just some vague excuse for avoiding the memoir, but two draft chapters of the novel set in Yucatán, handed over to Mrs. Brown. The setting is giving me trouble, though, as I’ve never visited the Yucatán. I need to see Chichén Itzá, the stones of those temples.

Mrs. Brown’s eyebrows sailed, just to hear the names spoken aloud. You could see the childhood longing still in her. The girl, hiding in
some chicken coop from sister Parthenia, dreamily turning pages of the
Geographic
.

I asked her to call the Asheville-Hendersonville air-port and find out how Pennsylvania Central Airlines might connect with Mérida. Mexico City will probably be the best bet. No, not passage for one. For two.

September 23

“No soap,” says Artie Gold. “You tell them that, your attorney says no soap, jump in a lake, bye-bye birdie. This letter you do not even have to answer.”

Artie had agreed to an emergency meeting on the condition we invite his twelve-year-old friend Grant. Ha-ha, as he would say. Grant is a blended scotch whisky. We met downtown on Patton Avenue, but en route to the bar he had to tramp through some errands. Coleman’s Man Store to pick up a shirt. (“Margaret says if I show up one more time looking like a hobo she will put me in a home. It’s the husband’s parents, they’re snobs.”) Next, Reiser’s Shoe Hospital, to fetch some resuscitated wing tips that should have gone to Reiser’s Crematorium, if there is one. Then Finkelstein’s Pawn.

“Is this how you generally impress new clients?”

Artie had handed his ticket through the iron grille, and we were waiting for the retrieval. “Ha! Don’t worry, I am not living on Skid Row just yet,” he said. “Although I wish the same could be said of all my clients. That ticket was given to me in lieu of payment, a very nice camel overcoat I’m told, to be had for only ten dollars.” Artie lowered his voice. “I’m going to give it back to the poor guy when cold weather hits.”

The bar was Leo’s, a little joint in the odd flatiron building that’s wedged into the acute corner of Battery and Wall. “This okay with you? Is it adequate to the purposes of impressing a new client?”

“It’s fine. I’m sorry, that was a joke.”

“Okay. Not very fancy, Leo’s. But a club I am allowed to join.” Carefully he folded and stacked his wardrobe on the stool beside him: camel coat, shirt, shoes. The girl at the bar had reached for the bottle of Grant’s when he came in the door, and came over with two little glasses hooked on her fingertips like thimbles. Artie seemed distracted, watching her fill the glasses, finishing his cigarette. “That club out at Bent Creek, you know it? I recently had a very high-profile client who moved here from Hollywood, prospective client I should say, I’m not naming names, he wanted to take me to his golf club for dinner, Bent Creek. To celebrate, get acquainted. Mr. Heston, I say to him, have you seen their promotional materials? ‘We cater to the better class of gentile clientele. We reserve the right to decline service to anyone we deem to be incompatible.’
Incompatible!
”

“Charlton Heston is your client?”

“As it happens, he is not.”

The waitress retreated to the other end of the bar, wiping out glasses with a red chamois cloth, but kept glancing at us. Dark lashes, cheekbones, a red ribbon around her black hair, tied on top. A tall, long-waisted girl, but still there was something of Frida about her. The way she carried those glasses on her fingers. Probably a violation of some hygiene rule, but she gets away with it. Men want their lips on her fingertips.

“Hey, how about that Jackie Robinson?” Artie asked out of nowhere. His mind moves like a train, and he pitches things out its window at an astonishing clip. “Are you a baseball fan, Shepherd?”

“I should apologize now for all the things I don’t know about. You might find me as thick-skulled as Mr. Heston. Baseball is a yen one learns from a father, I gather.”

He tilted his head, nodded. Though quite a talker, Artie was also a listener.

“I wasn’t raised in this country. Wasn’t raised, really at all.”

Artie exhaled a short laugh, not unsympathetic, and tossed back the shot of Grant’s. “If a person is not raised, then what? He grows from a seed?”

The whisky was both stringent and soothing, like cigar smoke. Twelve years waiting for a moment, this gullet. “No. In the scullery kitchens and probably the salt mines of this world, many a child is not so much raised as hammered into shape, Artie. To be of use. Surviving by the grace of utility alone.”

“This I know to be true, you are correct. Very well said. In this case, the absence of a father notwithstanding, have you heard of Jackie Robinson?”

“I do read the news. The Negro player they’ve let in the white leagues.”

“I saw the man play at McCormick Field this summer. I was there.”

“How was that?”

“Sensational. His second or third game with the Dodgers, and they play him down here in Dixie. The Colored section was packed like the last bus out of Arnhem, and the rest of the stands, empty. Like someone had yelled they were passing out free polio germs to the white people that day. I had a good seat, let me tell you.”

“I’ll bet.”

He unfolded the letter and flattened it on the counter. The earlier one from J. Edgar Hoover he’d barely glanced at, but this one he studied with inordinate care. Nevertheless, his verdict: No soap.

“My secretary wanted to burn it with the trash.”

“Good girl. You should give her a raise.”

“Well. I’m taking her to Mexico.”

“
Really
.” A wise-guy smirk.

“As my assistant, Artie. She’s forty-seven, for one thing. And for another, not my type.”

“Ah, yes. I recall.”

“You’re only about the third or fourth person to know that about me, by the way. The Selective Service, God, and you. A few others. But certainly my mother never worked it out.”

“Please. Discretion is my business, and I mean that sincerely.”

“Mrs. Brown is my right hand. This is a research trip, and I’ll need to stay a couple of months. She called you about helping with the passport.”

“Right, I recall. Well, her opinion of this letter from quote-unquote Aware Incorporated was absolutely correct.”

“It’s not a form,” I pointed out. “These things are very specific. Charles Chaplin. My books being read by Communists in China. I have to say, I’m flabbergasted.”

“That is their intention, to flabbergast. Is this a verb, can I say that?”

“I suppose.”

“Their mode is the surprise attack: they flabbergast. You hand over five hundred clams.”

“And then the game ends?”

“Not exactly. These publications he mentions are real. They accumulate names of alleged Reds and publish them in directories.”

“Who reads them?”

“Executives. Radio producers, Hollywood studios, even grocery chains. It’s handy, no muss no fuss. They can assure their advertisers they are taking every available precaution against hiring a Red.”

“But before he puts me on the list, he’s offering the chance to clear my name, for a fee.”

Artie spread his hands wide. “God bless America.”

“That’s straight blackmail. The employers must know the lists are meaningless.”